Good morning. Lyft Inc. has hired its first chief information security officer, who will have to address the growing risks associated with increasingly connected and autonomous vehicles, two areas central to the future of the ride-hailing company, CIO Journal's Steven Norton reports.

Mike Johnson joined Lyft as director of engineering and chief information security officer, with plans to “drive new security and privacy initiatives necessary to maintain our incredible growth, especially as Lyft pushes into new areas such as self-driving cars," he said via a Lyft spokesperson. He is a veteran of Salesforce.com Inc.

Lyft last month said it is forming its own autonomous-car development division that will be staffed by hundreds of engineers and technicians at new offices in Silicon Valley, a shift beyond partnerships. This week, General Motors Co., which last year invested $500 million in Lyft, hired two cybersecurity experts who are known for remotely hacking into a Jeep, a sign of emerging risks on the road to a connected future.

TECHNOLOGY NEWS

An aerial shot of destroyed and damaged homes after a tornado tore through the eastern neighborhood in New Orleans in February.

GERALD HERBERT/ASSOCIATED PRESS

Uber knowingly leased unsafe cars to drivers. The ride-hailing giant last year bought 1,000 Honda SUVs in Singapore that were subject to a recall. Last year one caught on fire, nearly injuring a driver. The episode, which wasn’t previously public knowledge, adds to the list of crises that unfolded at Uber Technologies Inc. on the watch of former Chief Executive Travis Kalanick. The WSJ's Douglas MacMillan and Newley Purnell have the story on how the company's breakneck growth across more than 70 countries has forced regional teams to operate without the systems and professional bureaucracy that multinational companies typically employ.

Researcher credited with stopping WannaCry arrested. The FBI this week arrested British national Marcus Hutchins over his alleged involvement in creating malware targeting personal banking information, the Guardian reports. Mr. Hutchins, a security researcher, achieved cyber fame in May after registering a website found in the code behind a worldwide ransomeware outbreak. The site ended up acting as a kill switch for the malware, the Guardian reports.

From driverless cars to flying ones. Google co-founder Larry Page’s flying-car startup enlisted star Google engineer Anthony Levandowski to work on the project months before Mr. Levandowski left the tech giant last year, allegedly with trade secrets, for rival Uber Technologies Inc., the Journal's Jack Nicas reports.Google parent Alphabet Inc. is suing Uber for allegedly conspiring with Mr. Levandowski. The Journal reported in May on how Mr. Levandowski, during his time at Google, led outside firms related to his work on self-driving cars and other projects. He eventually sold one to his employer for about $20 million.

Baccarat: Not just for Bond films. People linked to 2016's $81 million Bank of Bangladesh hack, the largest cyberheist in history, used marathon baccarat sessions in Manila to launder tens of millions of dollars, Bloomberg reports. The FBI is investigating possible links to North Korea.

Two China tech giants wrestle over data. Huawei Technologies Co. is collecting user-activity information on its smartphone in an effort to improve its AI capability, the WSJ reports. Problem is that the information captured includes text messages sent using WeChat. App maker Tencent Holdings Ltd. contends that Huawei is effectively taking Tencent’s data and violating the privacy of WeChat users. It has asked the Chinese government to intervene.

Drones, apps, AI speed up insurance claims. About four in 10 car insurers no longer use employees to physically inspect damage in some cases, the WSJ's Nicole Friedman reports. At insurance startup Lemonade, customers file claims by chatting with a bot, uploading relevant photos and recording videos of themselves describing the loss. The company’s algorithms run 18 antifraud tests.

FCC addresses digital divide in rural America. The Federal Communications Commission on Thursday took steps to boost incentives for carriers to expand broadband service, voting to overhaul one of its existing programs for extending wireless broadband, and moving forward with redesigning another existing subsidy program, the Connect America fund, which will distribute about $2 billion over a decade, the Journal's John D. McKinnon reports. The FCC estimates that in urban areas, 97% of Americans have access to high-speed fixed service. But in rural areas it is 65%, and 60% on tribal lands.

Symantec sells web-certification business. Cybersecurity firm Symantec Corp. said Wednesday it has agreed to sell its website-security business to DigiCert Inc., a Utah-based web-certification firm, the WSJ's Ezequiel Minaya reports. Symantec Chief Executive Greg Clark said in prepared remarks that selling DigiCert “allows us to sharpen our enterprise focus” on its cloud-security business.

Auto tech race forces Toyota to go local for IT talent. With Silicon Valley tech expertise at a premium, Toyota Motor Co. is leading an aggressive talent search closer to home, targeting talent along Tokyo's Nambu railway line, traditional home of Japan's tech companies. Bloomberg reports that the move "is unusual in a country where lifetime employment is still the norm at many big companies."

WHAT YOUR CEO IS READING

A rendering of one of the two identical Voyager spacecraft.

NASA/JPL-CALTECH

Every week, CIO Journal offers a glimpse into the mind of the CEO, whose view of technology is shaped by stories in management journals, general interest magazines and, of course, in-flight publications.

Legacy tech goes interstellar. Forty years and billions of miles later, the fate of the Voyager spacecraft plying interstellar space rest in the hands of a small team of engineers, “most of whom have been with the mission since the Reagan administration,” Kim Tingley writes for the New York Times Magazine. The right stuff separating these employees from their peers, many now retired, is their "fluency with archaic languages,” used to operate and coax data from the spacecraft’s onboard computers, which have only four kilobytes of storage and “have 235,000 times less memory and 175,000 times less speed than a 16-gigabyte smartphone.” Said one engineer on his tenure. "I would not leave Voyager to go to the new Mars missions. I will not leave Voyager until it ceases to exist. Or until I cease to exist.’’

Yeti with a smartphone. Digital natives process information no differently than the dinosaurs who can recall Windows 95 and educational institutions that built programs around the belief that young people today were born with an innate ability to multitask run the risk of doing their students a disservice, according to a recent study. "The digital native is a myth it claims, a yeti with a smartphone, notes a Nature editorial on the study, adding that "many members of the digital-savvy generation use technology in the same way as many of their elders: to passively soak up information.” Companies targeting digital natives make note.

Related: The smartphones effect.The Atlantic's Jean M. Twenge says the combined effects of the smartphone and social media are making kids today less independent and more unhappy. "The more time teens spendlooking at screens, the more likely they are to report symptoms of depression. Eighth-graders who are heavy users of social media increase their risk of depression by 27 percent, while those who play sports, go to religious services, or even do homework more than the average teen cut their risk significantly."

Jeff Bezos is here to help. The Onion, an online satire magazine, imagines Mr. Bezos as an advice columnist for startups. "Well, there’s no magic involved, but the keys to success are quite simple: Value your customers, hire well, find a market that isn’t being served, and realize that someday I will utterly crush you.”

The Morning Download is edited by Tom Loftus and cues up the most important news in business technology every weekday morning. Send us your tips, compliments and complaints. You can get The Morning Download emailed to you each weekday morning by clicking http://wsj.com/TheMorningDownload.